An art historian, curator, and critic explores the relationships between art, religion, and philosophy.

February 15, 2011

Enrique Martínez Celaya's project at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine is a test. In The Wanderer I argue that a biblical reading of Martínez Celaya's work is justified because his worldview has been shaped by writers for whom the Bible has figured prominently. This biblical reading is not an end but a means to demonstrate the seriousness of Martínez Celaya's project, a seriousness that is derived from the prophetic and ethical concerns of the western literary tradition that the Bible has inspired and provoked.

The Crossing consists of four monumental paintings, each 15' x 11,' made especially for and in response to the nave of the Cathedral. Placed in bays, two by two on either side of the nave, the paintings participated in the rich liturgical and sacramental life of one of the world's largest cathedrals. The four paintings continue Martínez Celaya's use of the compositional framework of the figure and landscape explored in The Wanderer. They include a boy embracing a horse in an open muddy field just after a rain; a dark green and blue painting of an abandoned boat at what seems to be dusk; a very large muddy, snow-covered path; and a young boy on crutches, with jewels on his body, in a lush but foreboding landscape bearing an object the shape of a house on his neck. This simple yet evocative imagery underscores the necessity and responsibility to act meaningfully and ethically in a resistant and ominous landscape. These paintings affirm the role of the Cathedral not only as a place to encounter transcendence or touch the divine, but to be encouraged to act meaningfully in and for the world.

Martínez Celaya's work forces art to bear a heavy metaphysical burden. Although he is not religious, Martínez Celaya's work can be considered religious in this way: it is intended to make him a better person and enhance the ethical sensitivity of those who engage and contemplate it. His work embodies Wittgenstein's claim that although he was not a religious man he could not help view everything from a religious perspective. The Crossing is Martínez Celaya's attempt to test the ethical claims he makes for his work by placing it in a context that exists for and in service to the Other.

It is one thing to make such claims in an art museum or gallery, in which viewers come primarily for an aesthetic experience that, since Kant, has been cut off from the ethical, religious, and spiritual--an experience that is now predominantly decorative and oriented toward entertainment. In this context, such non-aesthetic claims, like ethics or philosophy, are usually regarded as part of the decorative flair.

It is quite another to make such claims for art when it is presented in a context in which the ethical, religious, and spiritual is primary, in which the aesthetic serves the experience of the Other. Most visitors come to the Cathedral not for the aesthetic but the ethical, they seek guidance and sustenance, not entertainment. Moreover, they bring all their concerns in life into the church. Unlike the art museum or gallery, which intends for its viewers to step outside of the difficulties of life into an experience that is marked off as "art," the church encourages visitors (they are more than "viewers") to bring all of these concerns and problems of life with them. And so within this context the aesthetic thus presumes a deep and abiding connection to the ethical, the religious, the spiritual.

Trained in experimental physics at Cornell and Berkeley, Martínez Celaya often treats his work as an apparatus to mark and measure an experience, to test his theories against the results. The Crossing is such an apparatus. It evaluates the capacity of his work stand up to the weight of the ethical, religious, and spiritual in a context that is primarily ethical. Martínez Celaya shares his own thoughts here.

Martínez Celaya's paintings are thus not intended to overcome, undermine, critique, or otherwise compete with the context of the Cathedral. His work doesn't judge the context; the context judges the paintings. Instead of standing out, calling attention to themselves as "art," these paintings blend into the comprehensive aesthetic experience of the Cathedral, which participates with its other aesthetic components to touch the Other. "In Ambiguity at the American Acropolis," art historian and cultural critic Matthew J. Milliner explores how these paintings interact powerfully with the architectural design of Ralph Adams Cram. (Read it here.) These paintings subsequently become part of the church's sacramental and liturgical life rather than ignore or overturn it. For example, a funeral service took place during Vespers on the day that The Crossing opened to the public and so collectors, critics, and curators from around the world viewed these works with the sounds of a funeral mass on the organ and the smell of incense. And a few days later they witnessed the Cathedral's popular St. Francis Day festivities when animals are brought to the church to be blessed. The painting that features a figure embracing a horse thus absorbs the meaning and significance of St. Francis.

The Crossing does not suggest that art competes with religion, that the locus of the Spirit has left religion and now rests on art, or that art should be religious. It does, however, suggest that there might be a role for art in religious contexts, even decidedly non-religious art. But to do so the artist must become an ascetic. He must deny his urges to indulge in the self-expressive, creative, and decorative cant and behavior that drives the contemporary art world. Rather, the artist must cultivate the inherent relationship of art and ethics that has often been dormant throughout modernity. In Art, Origins, and Otherness, philosopher William Desmond suggests that we now expect too little of art because we have for the last two hundred years, asked way too much of it. The Crossing puts art back into perspective, restoring its dignity as a cultural practice that can touch our deepest needs without the idolatry of modernity.

February 11, 2011

I worked with artist Enrique Martínez Celaya on two closely-related projects this fall in New York. I curated The Wanderer: Foreign Landscapes of Enrique Martínez Celaya, an intimate exhibition of fifteen works drawn from private and public collections on view at the Museum of Biblical Art from 30 September 2010-16 January 2011. The other project, The Crossing, is an environment of four monumental paintings at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine from 1 October-27 November 2010. These projects mark an important transition in my on-going engagement with Martínez Celaya's work as well as evolving thought on art and religion, theology, and philosophy.

The Wanderer offered a biblical reading of the figure and landscape motif that has become the foundational structural framework in Martínez Celaya's work over the last ten years. Through this compositional and conceptual schema he marks the experience of loss and longing, hope and love, and death. I argue that his work could not only sustain but benefit positively from a biblical reading because I had discerned faint biblical resonances in his work over the last ten years. These biblical resonances, however, were not intentional because Martínez Celaya does not read the Bible.

But he reads. He reads Tolstoy, Mandelstam, Celan, Frost, Ahkmatova, Martinson, Dostoyevsky, Melville, Hesse, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. And it is through these writers whose work has been profoundly shaped and indelibly marked by the biblical narratives, themes, and imagery that Martínez Celaya has formed a biblical mindfulness.

The Wanderer makes two claims, one related to studio practice and the other concerning interpretation. First, it argues that the Bible's influence does not have to be embodied in a self-conscious way, as a form of meditation or reflection on particular biblical themes. If the Bible is the DNA of the western imagination, as such critics as George Steiner, Northrop Frye, and Andrew Delbanco suggest,then it should be present in some way in the work of an artist such Martínez Celaya, who is deeply formed by the western literary tradition, not only as a reader but as a writer of poetry and prose. And this is what cultural critic Alissa Wilkinson noticed in her review of the exhibition, entitled "Biblical Art that Isn't Biblical." (Read the review here.) Second, the exhibition argues that the Bible can function as a provocative and enriching critical tool, which can expand rather than limit the experience of art.

The Wanderer also reveals that Martínez Celaya's works within the same narrative structure as the Bible's, a narrative structure that many writers have assimilated. From Frost's traveler who happens upon two diverging paths in a yellow wood and Nietzsche's Zarathustra to Ahab's manaical pursuit of the mystical white whale and Hesse's Demian, the human person negotiates his life through the landscape, alone. Indeed, it is the figure and landscape motif that forms the dramatic structure of the Bible itself. It is Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden, Abraham being called from the land of Ur, Moses in the wilderness, Jesus fasting and being tempted in the desert and being hung on a cross outside the city, and St. Paul's journey from Jerusalem to Rome to speak truth to power and comfort the church in Rome. Martínez Celaya's paintings, sculptures, and photographs reveal the figure and the landscape as a distillation of this most powerful biblical theme in western literature.

The biblical metaphor for my approach to Martínez Celaya's work, which I explore in an the essay included in the exhibition catalogue, is the "mark of Cain," in which God both curses and blesses the first murderer, condemining him to wander the world homeless yet protected. (If you are interested in purchasing the exhibition catalogue, which also features an essay by Harvard curator and cultural historian Ivan Gaskell and beautiful reproductions of the work in the exhibition, order it here.)

The Bible is a rich resource for critical practice. But for use in this context, it needs to be liberated from the believers, who fear that its authority or infallability as God's word is undermined if it approached as literature. For them, art, literature, music, film, and theatre should function as Bible studies and devotional exercise in paint, sound, word, and image. Far from protecting it, this literalistic approach to "Biblical art" weakens its power, restricting its use to quoting chapter and verse in support of dogma and theology. This makes the Bible boring and obscures the fact that it is a dynamic and powerful cultural artifact, a library of powerful stories, within which we in the western tradition have lived and breathed and have had our being. And for centuries it has been the engine that drove art and literature.

Martínez Celaya's work reveals the Bible's abiding presence for those artists and writers who struggle to make sense of the world and who aspire to make work that might have a life beyond the moment it was made, beyond the life of the artist who made it. Perhaps this is what theologian R.R. Reno senses in his review of the exhibition, "The Body of Death, Pictured." (Read the review here.)

The Wanderer also mounts a critique of the secular establishment art world, which has forgotten the profound influence that the Bible has played in forming western culture, including western individuality. For most critics, the Bible is just a thing that Sarah Palin lugs around on Sunday mornings and quotes from to support her policies. But this biblical illiteracy and insensitivity impoverishes art and cultural criticism. Admittedly, to recognize and acknowledge such biblical resonances and influences for western culture risks opening up a pandora's box that secularists have long tried to keep shut: that modernity emerged from and has lived off the creative capital of the Judeo-Christian tradition, including its theology, as it was embodied in the Renaissance humanism and the Reformation. Recent books by scholars Michael Allen Gillespie (The Theological Origins of Modernity) and Bruce Hoslinger (The Premodern Condition) have revealed this more clearly. The paucity and shallowness of contemporary art criticism, which oscillates between journalism, marketing, and obscure pseudo-theory, might be ameliorated through a rediscovery of the literary treasures of the Bible, treasures that have seduced the greatest minds and artists throughout modernity (and postmodernity). In a recent Huffington Post essay, "Return of the Religious in Contemporary Art," in which The Wanderer figures prominently, art and cultural critic Mathew J. Milliner claims to discern evidence of such a rediscovery. (Read the article here.)

The Museum of Biblical Art was the ideal context for The Wanderer. It is a museum committed to revealing the vitality of the Bible in western culture through exhibitions of art from historical periods, such as the Renaissance and Byzantium, in which the Bible played a direct aesthetic role. The Wanderer argues that the Bible is one of the means by which to reveal the power of Martínez Celaya's work, a power that is unique in the contemporary art world. This project, however, has led me to pursue in much more depth the role that literature and writing in general have played in his work, work that is biblical because it is literary.

The Crossing, which will be the subject of my next post, tested the claims of The Wanderer.

February 07, 2011

I have received a few comments about the last sentence in my recent post, entitled "A Shift," and it seems worthwhile to develop it in greater detail. I write, "[A]rt and religion" as a discourse that is "applied" to Martínez Celaya's work is irrelevant. What will be of relevance will emerge only through my concrete engagement with his work, and that includes my religious commitments." Some readers have expressed either curiousity or concern that my religious commitments would be challenged, tested, or evaluated by art.

Most critical discourse arises from the critic's recognition of something familiar in an artist's work, a reflection of her own interests. Yet art is more than a playground or Rorschach test for critics to indulge their personal commitments. T.S. Eliot once said that the meaning of poem is located somewhere between the work and the reader. The critic must explore this "between," must somehow push through her preoccupations and proclivities, religious or otherwise, toward the work. The challenge of criticism is to use such interests and commitments in an expansive way, which opens up the work for those readers and viewers who do not share those interests and commitments.

Too much critical discourse on art that is informed by religious commitments is not expansive. Rather, it tends to look like "applied religion" or "applied theology," in which engagement with art is merely an extension or elaboration of the particular religious, confessional, or denominational community within which one writes. My desire to test my own religious commitments in the light of my critical engagement with art is an attempt to resist this temptation. My religious commitments consist of affirming that, as St. John says in his Prologue, "through him [Christ] all things were made" and as St. Paul writes, "in him [Christ] all things hold together." The "all things" must include art, specific works of art. In this context, my particular denominational or confessional identity is beside the point. What matters is whether I believe St. John and St. Paul.

February 01, 2011

Artists and art historians have a strange relationship. Most art historians presume that artists need them because artists have little awareness of their work outside their self-absorbed studio confines and are poorly equipped to reflect on art historically, critically, and theoretically. Moreover, most art historians believe that they are necessary for an artist's work to achieve significance outside the studio. And artists have by and large played along. Artists seem to believe that art historians (including critics and curators) are the gatekeepers of larger art world significance. But this gatekeeping role is in fact the art historian's fearful reaction to their perceived irrelevance to studio practice--that all that an art historian can offer is "discourse" that is draped over the work. This strange relationship is manifest in a number of ways, for example, when artist's ask art historians to write essays for their exhibition catalogues or when studio art faculty ask the art history faculty to give their students a language with which to articulate their work in attractive (i.e., intellectually sophisticated) ways. It appears that most artists and art historians are content with this mutually parasitic relationship: the artist believes that her work is stamped with "seriousness" if an art historian writes about it and the artist's coquettish flirtations seem to mask the art historian's impotence in front of a work of art by making him intellectually virile and desirable.

This relationship need not be conducted at this low, cynical, and self-servingly adolescent level. But it requires art historians to refuse their gatekeeping post in the contemporary art world and leave their gaggle of graduate students (or abandon the fantasy of one day having them) in order to embrace the challenge of teaching art history in an explicitly studio art context. It is in this context that the art historian can prove his mettle, by teaching a subject that is not simply an "academic discipline" but a living practice with a history and tradition that the studio art student must assimilate and make her own.

The problem is that most studio art students (and their studio faculty) assume art history to be irrelevant beyond fulfilling departmental requirements, offering a few historical details, dropping a few names, and crafting some theoretical phrases with which the student can decorate her artist statements for grad school applications. Most studio art students thus experience a chasm at least as wide as Lessing's Ugly Broad Ditch between the artists that are the subject of art historian's lectures and their own student work. The student rightly asks, what does Raphael, Dürer, Pollock, Richter, and Koons--the winners--have to do with my insecure, stumbling irrelevant, work?

The challenge for the art historian teaching in a studio context is to tell the story of the history of art in a way that reveals to the student that she is being initiated into the same practice (with the same challenges) as the art historical winners and that they have a right to aspire to make art that is big, ambitious, and adds something to the world. Moreover, the art historian has to demonstrate that the history of art offers insights that can improve their studio practice. (I believe that this story has something to do with emphasizing that the decisions these artists made, inside and outside the studio, before they became the "winners", are the same decisions that the art student must confront. But that will be the subject of another post.) The study of art history must become a necessary means for the student to develop wisdom and discernment and sharpen her decision-making skills in the studio.

But responsibility also falls on the artist. The student (and her art faculty) must recognize that artistic practice is not merely for "visual thinkers," for "creative self-expressive types," and for those for whom other "practical" (or bourgeois) vocations, like those that require reading and writing, clear thinking, and disciplined 60-hour weeks, are irrelevant. Artistic practice demands that the artist bring all that she can to the studio and that includes the disciplines of reading and writing, of thinking analytically and looking theoretically and historically. This is what the art student needs and this is what the art historian can offer.

I am working out these and other aspects of art historical work in a studio context through the Summer Workshop, a week-long series of critiques, lectures, and conversations established last summer and led by artist Enrique Martínez Celaya and me during the first week of August at Whale & Star, Martínez Celaya's studio in Miami, Florida. Modelled after the famous Bread Loaf Writers' conference at Middlebury College in Vermont, the Summer Workshop is an intense experience within the context of Martínez Celaya's 18,000 square foot facility, which houses his studio, imprint, research archive and library. The Summer Workshop offers an opportunity for artists to experience how art history and theory can play an important role in their studio practice through a unique educational collaboration between an artist and art historian.

The year's Summer Workshop will take place from July 31-August 5. Visit www.whaleandstar.com for more details.

I had not intended to take a hiatus from this blog during the fall semester. It just worked out that way. I started this blog over two years ago to serve as a platform to reflect on the theological, philosophical, and aesthetic implications of my book, God in the Gallery, which had just been released by Baker Academic. But it has begun to shift. Although my hiatus was unintended, it was necessary. My work this fall posed a significant challenge for interpreting it within the existing scope of the blog.

This challenge has forced me to recognize that my work with the Miami-based artist Enrique Martínez Celaya has become the hub through which all my work passes, including my classroom teaching at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, God in the Gallery, and this blog. It is thus not simply one of several iterations of my interest in art and religion. It is the project that defines and tests all others, including my interest in art and religion. And so this blog must reflect that shift in focus and priority. From this perspective, "art and religion" as a discourse that is "applied" to Martínez Celaya's work is irrelevant. What will be of relevance will emerge only through my concrete engagement with his work, and that includes my religious commitments.

August 31, 2010

August 27, 2010

In Andrei Tarkovsky's remarkable film, The Passion of Andrei Rublev (1966), Rublev observes Boriska, a young boy who is struggling desperately to caste a bell for the church tower, taking over for his father who has died of the plague, claiming that he knows the "secret" of bell making, which his father passed on to him before dying. Although he ultimately succeeds in his endeavor, saving his life and raising the spirits of the village, he has failed. For his father had not given him the secret and so he is destined—cursed even—to make bells without the cherished answer. The boy is cut off from the living tradition that animates his father's work. He must invent it or make it up. The Prince who commissioned the bell and the village who helped make it don't know. But he does. Although no one notices, the boy's defeat seems utterly definitive and devastating. It is at that moment, as Rublev comforts the boy, that he determines to paint the icon of the Trinity that he has been avoiding. Rublev finally breaks his long silence, "We will go to the Trinity Monastery, and you will make bells and I will paint icons."

The bellmaker recapitulates Rublev's journey and is the interpretive key to Tarkovsky's film. Like Boriska, whose father has taught him everything but "the secret" of bellmaking, Rublev's mentor, Theophanes the Greek, cannot give him his reason to paint. Rublev must find it himself. Racked by self-doubt and fear that he paints for the wrong reasons, he gives up painting and takes a vow of silence. And it is then that Rublev comes upon the desperate son of a dead bellmaker, Boriska.

In Melville's Moby-Dick Ishmael states, "Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it." This secret, like that of Boriska's father, is our participation in a living tradition that gives meaning and significance to our artistic and religious practices. For Melville, as it is for Tarkovsky, that living tradition, that "secret of our paternity" can never be inherited. It can only be invented, made up, over and over again. The bellmaker's secret, which Boriska so desperately sought from his dying father, is finding the right blend of clay, manure, and straw to form the mold for the bell. This secret, however, can only be found through trial and error, through feel, touch, smell, and faith. Boriska's defeat, then, ultimately becomes his triumph as he initiates himself into the living tradition of the bellmaker's craft.

Boriska's challenge is also Rublev's. Although he has been blessed with talent, has received the training, and had already enjoyed considerable fame, Rublev lacks the "secret" of painting. He finds it, it seems, as he embraces the exhausted Boriska, after his long journey through self-doubt, not only as a painter but as a monk, as a Christian.

I am working on an exhibition of Miami-based artist Enrique Martínez Celaya that opens October 1 at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York City which explores the relationship of figure and landscape in his work through the biblical narratives that have influenced it indirectly through the writings of Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, and Hermann Hesse among many others. The Wanderer: Foreign Landscapes of Enrique Martínez Celaya discloses a world that is stripped to its barest essentials, isolating a space in which we must act, must take a position in relation to the work and in so doing acknowledge their (our) identity as a wanderer ever on the move, never comfortably home, simultaneously cursed and blessed, longing for something more, somewhere else in the midst of landscapes that are ultimately foreign. The Wanderer suggests that we bear the mysterious and enigmatic mark of Cain: "You shall be a fugitive and wanderer on the earth" (Gen. 4: 12).

The biblical narratives themselves are distinct iterations of the figure and landscape theme. From the moment God places Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the drama of the human project is narrated through the relationship of the figure in and to the landscape (Gen. 1-3). As God banishes our ancient parents from the Garden, the figure's relationship to the landscape is stamped with the impossible desire to return and heavy with the burden of toil and hardship. Abraham and Sarah are called out of the land of Ur to wander the landscape in search of a land that God has provided (Gen. 12); Abraham accompanies his beloved son Isaac on a lonely walk to Mount Moriah to obey God's command to sacrifice his son (Gen. 22); Moses leads the Hebrews out of Egypt into the desert for forty years (Exod. 13); Jonah refuses God's command to travel to Nineveh and instead flees to Tarshish (Jonah 1: 1-3). And Christ, who recapitulates the entire history of God's people, also embodies this figure and the landscape theme, as he is driven into the desert to be tempted by Satan, wanders throughout Israel and Judah, and dies outside the city.

We do not inherit the secret of faith. We must invent it on our own, like Boriska who lies about having the secret and yet, in the end, possesses it through his own efforts. The project of our lives must be accomplished one decision at a time, alone. This is the secret of a living tradition, the secret of our paternity.

August 24, 2010

My participation in Veritas Riff, a group of thirteen scholars brought together this summer by Andy Crouch and Michael Lindsay and supported by Veritas Forum, includes a partnership with Patheos, a dynamic new web portal that "connects seekers, students, and believers to faith communities, scholars, and resources for deeper exploration and greater understanding of faith practices, wisdom traditions, and spirituality." It includes portals for New Age religion, Catholicism, Mainline Protestantism, Evangelicalism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, Judaism, and Paganism. My Veritas Riff colleagues and I have been invited to serve as "experts" in the Evangelicalism portal. (See my expert page here.) I am not sure how this page will interface with this site but I am certain that my ideas will be tested in and through this new context.

August 23, 2010

I have just published a blog post over at church and postmodern culture:conversation, the site that supports philosopher Jamie Smith's series for Baker Academic.(You can read it here.)In it I offer a defense of Veritas Riff, a new initiative developed by Andy Crouch and Michael Lindsay through Veritas Forum that is intended to help evangelical Christian academics reach larger and different audiences with their projects.Through my experience with Veritas Riff I reflect on the dangers of the academic bubble, in which we scholars delude ourselves into believing that the contents of our classroom lectures, seminar room discussions, and academic conferences actually have relevance in the larger and often more messy marketplace of ideas.We rarely test our ideas outside the hermetically sealed bubble of the academic world although we often assume that we are engaging, transforming, and otherwise impacting that larger culture.I urged my academic readers, most of them philosophers and theologians, to test their ideas outside the world of academia.

Well, I just returned from a test.I recently published an online essay, "Art as Ascetic Practice" that caught the attention of a few arts leaders at the Institute of Faith and Work at Tim Keller's Redeemer Presbyterian Church (PCA).And while I was in New York working on some research projects last week, I was invited to attend a meeting of about twenty-five arts professionals to discuss my article.What I did not realize was that the artists, ballet dancers, movie directors, and actors in attendance would take turns reading my article out loud.There are very few exercises more humbling and uncomfortable than listening to your work being read in a voice not your own, especially if it is a voice trained at Julliard.

What was clear about my article is that it did not give concrete examples of how ascetic practices and disciplines like fasting can play a role in artistic practice. We seemed in agreement in theory, but we needed some examples. The discussions that followed focused on those specifics and so I will share some that I brought up in the course of our conversations.

Fasting is an important discipline in studio practice because it liberates the artist from self-indulgent habits that cloud her ability to make wise aesthetic decisions, enabling her to rely on habits that are comfortable and feel good, but which over time produce soft and flabby work. So, I will often ask a student to select three of his favorite colors and then make a painting that does not use them.I might also ask a student to spend an entire day in the studio not painting but simply looking at the work she is making in order to learn not simply to act on a surface but to respond to it, to listen to it, and to learn to evaluate the decisions she has made so far. I might also ask a student to scrape paint from his canvas, devoting an entire day in the studio of editing, deleting.

My evening discussion reminded me that my ideas must be tested, not merely in classrooms and art student studios or among my academic colleagues, but on the front line of artistic practice, like the twenty-five arts professionals in New York City that took time from their rigorous day to read my essay and to discuss it within the context of their own work.

July 12, 2010

I recently published a short piece on the relationship between artistic and ascetic practice for the website at Comment. Read it here. I also reviewed Sarah Thornton's book, Seven Days in the Artworld, for the print edition of Comment (Summer 2010).